Quicksand and Vectors

In the movie "The Replacements," expression-challenged Keanu Reeves delivers a pretty memorable speech about the nature of adversity.  He is sitting in a locker-room, pre-football game, while the coach try to talk a team up from the previous week's defeat.  The coach, played by Gene Hackman, asks his players, "what scares you?" After a fun interchange about spiders and bees, Keanu pipes up.  "Quicksand," he says.  The team is confused so the coach has him explain:

"You're playing and everything is going fine.  And then one thing goes wrong and another and another.  And you try to fight it but there's nothing you can do.  You're in over your head. Like quicksand."

I think this fear is more legitimate for high school students in 2016 than it is even for professional football players.  Because here's the reality of your lives: things were going well.  You had good grades, you worked pretty hard, everything seemed pretty smooth.  Then BANG.  You suddenly weren't moving forward.  You were stuck.  But hey adversity was nothing new so you doubled back and tried something else.  BANG. You started to feel trapped.  Classes used to be so easy.  But this junior year thing, this college writing thing.  It seemed like a trap.  Wait, you said without saying it, I have to tackle a complex, truly difficult prompt, organize a response on a level I've never encountered before, all while getting held to a rubric that feels way over my head?

At this point in the year, AP Lang can feel a bit like quicksand in that regard.  Vocabulary, rhetorical tools, sentence styles, tone, audience... so many things to keep track of all at once.  So what if instead of adding to the overwhelming complexity of it all we try to simplify things?  What if we reduced the pressure instead of turning it up?

If we reduce an RA to its simplest component it's really all about purpose.  Why did the author put these words on paper?  Why?  Once you can answer that you can tackle corollaries: why is it effective? what tone is created? how does that tone convey the purpose to the audience?

In the wonderful animated movie "Despicable Me", Gru (voiced by Steve Carrell) runs into a man at the Bank of Evil (formerly Lehman Brothers) who calls himself "Vector".  It's another spendid cinematic exchange.  But Vector's name is symbolic, he says, because he (like the word itself) has direction and magnitude.  ("Oh yeah!")

Vector is an interesting idea to apply analysis too.  Authors, with their words, have direction (purpose) and magnitude (tone).  They are headed somewhere; they have a goal.  They can also convey a certain immediacy about that journey.  We have seen evidence of different tones in almost everything we read.  In "Usher", Poe knows that his dark and chaotic tone will ultimately help him achieve the wonderfully introspective purpose of his short story.  In "Young Goodman Brown", Hawthorne skewers the overly judgmental Puritans to achieve his ends.  Even in "Candide" today Voltaire effected a tone - sardonic, sarcastic, slightly inappropriate - to drive his frustration home.

So what if tomorrow instead of worrying about how many rhetorical tools you can find you asked yourself a simple question: what is the "vector" of this passage? Where is it going? Can I articulate the goal here?  And once I can how is it trying to get there?  Am I supposed to feel something along the way?

Because here's what you already know: quicksand thrives on people flailing about reaching in any direction for literally anything.  It's chaotic and unfocused.  They sink faster.  So to avoid it you need to reach out with a deliberate effort for a specific goal and pull yourself toward the answer.

That's your vector.